king of the Ostrogoths (from 471), who invaded Italy in 488 and completed the conquest of virtually the entire peninsula and Sicily by 493, making himself king of Italy (493–526) and establishing his capital at Ravenna. In German and Icelandic legend, he is the prototype of Dietrich von Bern. Early life Theodoric was the son of the Ostrogothic chieftain Theodemir and as a boy lived as a hostage in Constantinople, then the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Although he thus had some of the advantages of a Roman upbringing, he was said to have remained illiterate. This is undoubtedly an exaggeration: what is meant is that he never attained the skill in calligraphy that was expected of a ruler in the 5th and 6th centuries. At the time of his birth the Ostrogoths had recently escaped from the empire of the Huns, who had fiercely oppressed them, uprooting them from their homes in the Ukraine, transferring them to Pannonia, and taking away their grain. For more than 30 years after...